PUTRAJAYA, Nov 2 — Malaysia’s revenue as stated in Budget 2016 has shown the government was right to introduce the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and roll back on subsidies to enable the country to weather the current global economic storms, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said today.

Najib who is also finance minister said that despite external factors such as the increase of US interest rates and the drop in world crude oil prices, Putrajaya will be able to continue spending on programmes for the people next year as scheduled.

“We are able to do this because we had taken proactive measures, because we had made the right considerations, and we had strengthened the national economy’s resilience, specifically in government revenue,” he told civil servants in his speech during their monthly gathering at Dataran Perdana here this morning.

“When we introduced rationalisation measures for subsidies and when we introduced GST and such, as we promised, we give back to the rakyat.”

In the recently tabled Budget 2016, GST collection was said to be expected to increase government revenue by RM39 billion, versus RM27 billion in the first eight months of 2015.

Federal spending was also increased to RM267.2 billion as opposed to the RM260.7 billion allocated for 2015.

Najib also said that with the introduction of GST, the government did not need to take much belt-tightening measures as it did during the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

“Usually if we are facing these kinds of uncertainties, we would need to reduce spending and development OE (operating expenditure), like what happened to the country in 1997 when faced with the Asian financial crisis,” he said.

“Why is it not happening now? Instead, not only are we continuing programmes, but we are able afford to add more programmes for the welfare of the public,” he added.